ISpot.tv Banks $21.9M To Track The Trickle-Down Effect Of TV Ads

ISpot.tv, which helps advertisers gauge the cross-channel impact of their national TV ads, revealed Tuesday it raised $21.9 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $27.5 million.

The Seattle-based company, which has more than 60 employees and 150 customers including P&G and Holiday Inn, will invest this latest round into further developing its product suite and introducing advanced tools to account for multiscreen streaming, according to founder and CEO Sean Muller.

ISpot.tv’s core platform measures the search, social and online video activity that resulted from the airing of a TV ad.

“If you’re a brand in the wireless carrier category, you want to know how much media weight you carry vs. that of your competitors and you want to make corrections and adjustments in real time,” Muller said. “The other use case is understanding which ad creative consumers are paying attention to.”

ISpot.tv built what has been described as an IMDB database for television commercials. Its audio and video fingerprinting technology crawls and catalogs advertisements and then supplies metadata back to brands and advertisers. It typically tracks 6,000 shows a month across 106 networks, which represents about 100,000 TV placements.

Muller said ISpot.tv’s API makes it easy for users to port its TV-level data into existing third-party systems like digital ad-buying platforms or other business intelligence tools like Tableau.

Many of its clients marry ISpot.tv’s insights to other data points, such as sales information, website traffic, app downloads or app usage data.

Although the TV analytics space is crowded, with platforms such as Civolution and Samba TV focused on syncing digital ads and second-screen campaigns to TV content, ISpot.tv claims it’s different since it measures 1 billion earned media interactions generated from paid TV campaigns.

While hardcore fans might download second-screen apps to use in conjunction with their favorite TV programs, ISpot.tv discovered most viewers preferred to use the apps they had already downloaded on their mobile device or iPad.

“When people are watching TV, we learned they like to use the platforms and apps they’re already using, which is typically Google or Yahoo Bing for search, Facebook and Twitter for social and YouTube for video content,” Muller said.

Although ISpot.tv is more of an analytics play than a programmatic ad platform, Muller said it has both digital exchange and emerging television supply-side platform partnerships in place.

“Programmatic is much more nascent in TV than in digital, but you’ve got a lot more supply-side platform inventory beginning to open up,” he said. “Programmatic TV will be a big area of growth, but today it’s still very small. Once we have better measurement, I think that’s when you’ll really see programmatic take off in television.”